Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Yummy! Char Siew and Siu Yoke

The results of my pork baking experiments:

The Char Siew was relatively easy. You just need enough strength to open the vacuumm tight LKK Char Siew sauce, a clean spoon to scoup out the heavy mass and enough patience to coat the entire block of meat with the sauce.

The piece of meat that I had was quite small, so I didn't bother to make any incisions etc etc.

Marinate for 2 hours and into my bread toaster for 20 minutes. Hubby finished it with a smack of the lips.....

***

And of course my next experiment was the Chinese Roasted Pork/"siu yoke".

The original recipie I got from Mummy Moon site. It is the usual 4D3N recipie. When I went to buy the ingredients, I saw there are 3 kinds of white rice vinegar - the synthetic kind, the kind mentioning the use of rice and the last one using glutinous rice. I bought the last kind since it was the one used in the recipie.

In my original entry, you would note that some comments mentioned it didn't work out as well as expected. Also others commented that she didn't use vinegar at all.

Curiousity got the better of me.

I found the reasons for some of the actions:1) You put the meat in the fridge for so long partly to dry out the skin.2) Vinegar normally 'cooks' the meat. And so I reckon putting the vinegar on the meat for 3 nights would actually mean the skin is partially 'cooked'. Thus you can imagine when it goes into the oven, the partially cooked skin would 'burn' faster which I guess is what we want.

So, this was my block of 'not-so-nicely-arranged' pork. You see the skin didn't cover the entire block of meat so there were parts of the meat that would be exposed to the high heat in the final part. I decided to experiment and put the meat on a aluminium paper and use the aluminium paper to cover the exposed ends at the final part.....

HOWEVER, no part of the skin can touch the base becuase the base will have alot of liquid from the fat and the juice of the pork. So, if it is wet, it cannot crisp!

I started on Monday with salt and five-spice powder all over the meat.Poured some vinegar in a bowl and used my hands to rub the vinegar into the skin.

Tuesday.....re-read the recipie....oppss....forgot to poke holds. Hai, the meat was too cold and quite hard to poke holds. I put the meat in the 'Chiller' section of the fridge since this was a closed area. Scared the meat smell filled up my fridge you see.

Put more vinegar on the skin.

Wednesday...took out the meat to let it thaw for a while. Took a knife and poked like mad on the skin. Poked and poked and poked....Rubbed some vinegar again.Also put salt on the skin, in clumps!!! Loads of it. And all the time thinking this can't be healthy!!! This was the derivation I made from the original.

I decided to roast it that evening - only 2 nights of vinegar rubbing.

Put it in the middle section of the bread toaster, set the setting to top and bottom roast roasted for 15 minutes.Then put it on the top section of the toaster and set it to only top roast for another 15 minutes.

Result ?

The bubbly parts of the skin are the crispy parts. It was the salt that made the difference I reckon. And of course I brushed off the extra salt!!!

A nice plate of siu yoke. Not bad for my first time. Hubby declares now no need to buy siu yoke already!Lessons to consider:Lesson 1 - my salt was not really that fine, so to me the meat was not salty enough. And I think I put too much five spice in some areas of the meat. You see I poured the five spice from the packet onto my fingers on top of the meat....so some 'clumps' landed directly on the meat!Lesson 2 - next time I will put a little bit of pepper on the meat as well.Lesson 3 - buy a proper piece of meat! :)

And to end it all off, a picture of Christopher wanting to look at the pictures he saw me taking of the food!